The teaser of the Season 2
premiere is, in a way, an example of what every season premiere of Lost will
be until the end: classic misdirection as to where we are and to what we are
going to be focused on. The opening minutes of this episode seem to follow a
complete stranger whose face we never see in what appears to be some kind of
bachelor pad going through what appears to be a morning routine, complete with
what will seem to be discordant theme music: Mama Cass’s “Make Your Own Kind of
Music.’ (Many of the characters who have
tunes associated with them do so mainly out of irony that anything else; this
will be true here.) Then there’s this blast, the record goes off the needle,
and everything shifts. This stranger moves towards a safe, arms himself, starts
looking through a series of mirror until we realize that, yes, we never the
island. In fact, we’re right back where we left off at the end of Season 1.
It's fitting that the first faces
we recognize this season are Jack and Locke because this episode is essentially
about them both, the increasing divide between them as well the commonality
that they have but are ignoring. The hatch door is gone and even though Jack
has dismissed its original purpose, Locke is just as determined to get down it
as before and actually seems bemused at the idea of going back now. He asks
Jack why he’s afraid to go down there, omitting the fact that Jack was only
interesting in going down in to save everybody. This is still Jack’s priority
when he comes back to the caves and he tries to offer assurances he can’t
realistically feel that when the sun comes up, they’ll all be okay. Locke then
does what he has done before and will keep doing, immediately and deliberately
undercutting him.
The shift in Locke’s character in
Season 2 is one that has been fiercely debated by fans over the last eighteen
years: why did this powerful warrior begin to shrink so much and seem so
diminished throughout Season 2? The major speculation held by Nikki Stafford
was that Locke was suffering a crisis of faith. I’d actually like to make a
counter-argument that, in fact, Locke’s character is more or less the same as
he was throughout Season 1 – and it brings up the major character trait he and
Jack share: a narrowness of vision.
Locke has always been separate
from the survivors throughout Season 1, and none of that changes after the
hatch is opened. It just becomes more obvious. Take the scene with Hurley where
Hurley demands to know – very reasonably, why John blew up the hatch door after
he started running that “We can’t do this.” Locke more or less seems to first
laugh him off, and then give an excuse along the lines of: “Maybe because I was
tired of waiting.” Similarly when Kate goes after him into the jungle to see
him still at the door, he says simply: “I was waiting for you.” While he is
lowering Kate down the hatch, Kate shouts out: “Maybe we should stop,” and
Locke doesn’t wait until she finished speaking until he keeps lowering her. After
Jack gives his speech about being safe not only does Locke start going in the
woods, there’s a very dismissive, almost sarcastic tone when he discussed what
the sane and safe thing is to do. In later seasons, many commentators will say
that Locke’s behavior becomes more detached and crazy. I’d argue that in fact
that is completely consistent with what we see in this episode. (I’ll have more
to say about other aspects of Locke’s narrowness of vision in future episodes.)
What’s interesting that while Jack
claims to be the voice of rationality in this argument, he shares a similar
narrowness of vision that Locke does. The only difference is, as the title
suggests, Locke’s has to do with faith and Jack has to do with science. This is
crystal clear when Jack and Hurley are walking back to the caves and Jack wants
to know why Hurley kept shouting ‘The numbers of bad.’ Hurley deflects but Jack
says he wants to listen. So Hurley essentially does what almost never happens
on this show: he tells Jack every single aspect of his story (most of which we
saw in Numbers) and then points out that he saw those same numbers on the
hatch. Jack’s first question is: “You were in a psych ward?” He then does what
everyone else has done when Hurley has discussed the numbers before and
dismisses him. In a rare case of pique, Hurley actually gets pissed to tell
Jack his bedside manner sucks. Yet even with this information Jack seems
completely unwilling to accept that there is any correlation between the
numbers Hurley’s heard in the psych ward and their later connection to the
hatch. Locke is determined to believe that everything is destiny, no matter
what evidence to the contrary. Jack is just as determined to believe there is a
rational one.
And there is a similar level of
blindness when it comes to what he believes he should do. Locke goes into the jungle;
he doesn’t even bother to move. Kate says she’s going after Locke and Jack
waits maybe two seconds before going in after her. (The irony that for a
change Jack is the one trailing after Kate can not be lost on the viewer.) Throughout
his trek down the rabbit hole of the hatch, Jack just takes all the strangeness
in with complete neutrality, even after the key around begins to show a strange
attraction. Then Locke shows up with a gun to his head and Jack seems more
concerned with proving Locke was an idiot than whether or not Locke (or even
himself) gets killed.
What makes this even more
interesting is Jack’s flashback. After this episode Jack’s flashbacks will
increasingly take on a strident and irritating tone, but this is not the case
with the one here. Perhaps it is because, based on the time line we will see,
the one here is chronologically the first one in Jack’s flashbacks.
(Interestingly enough, I think the flashbacks for all of the castaways we meet
in the first season take place within in a very short period of time, a theory
I’ll elaborate on as we go forward.) It is clear this flashback takes place
before the one we saw in Do No Harm, which based on what we here is at most a
year before that.
We see Sarah being wheeled into
the ER basically as she described, claiming to Jack that she wanted to ‘dance
at her wedding.’ We get some additional knowledge here: Sarah was engaged to
someone else first and that in a sense Jack’s marriage was based on that
additional sense of obligation. There’s also the fact that Jack fundamentally
believes that the operation he is about to perform will ultimately do nothing
to improve her mobility.
Christian, as you’d expect,
appears in this flashback to ‘chew Jack out’ (from his point of view.) It’s
interesting though that his advice is essentially that Jack has to work on his
bedside manner and at least try to offer hope, even if, in the eyes of Jack,
it’s false hope. Jack scoffs at it, but before he performs Sarah’s surgery, he
looks at her and says: “I will fix you.” (This was referred to a few times in
Do No Harm; the viewer is still not clear yet how much this truly applies to
Jack.
It's interesting that in the scene
in the stadium, Jack’s encounter with Desmond is based on the idea that he is
trying to face the fact that he can not follow through with his promises.
Desmond challenges Jack on this idea, using pretty much verbatim the kind of
phrasing Locke will use in White Rabbit, and in a way Jack pays it pretty much
the same heed. Even when he has performed the miracle, he has to see it to
believe it. The tears and joy that appear on Matthew Fox’s face are remarkable,
mainly because they seem to come from a place of innocence in a way that we
will never see again.
And in it’s the last minute of the
episode that we realize what the true misdirection of the Season 2 premiere has
been. We have spent the entire season thinking that this will be the episode
that reveals what’s in the hatch after a summer of wanting to know what was
down there. And while we do seem to get that, that’s not the real
revelation of the episode. Because in the last minute, we learn who was in the
hatch from the beginning – and it’s none other than Desmond. That is the
biggest WTF of the entire episode and is also critical to what will become one
of the most crucial characters in the entire series.
It's also part of what will be the
larger theme of Season 2. Throughout the season we will spend a lot of time in
the hatch, learn its mysteries and try to figure out what exactly its there
for. However because so much of what we see about it seems to have a scientific
explanation (however mysterious) we will spend a lot of the episode thinking
that there is a scientific explanation for what we are seeing.
The flashbacks, however, will tell
a different story one that fundamentally bears out Locke’s point of view that
they were all chosen to be on the island. With almost every flashback that
unfolds in Season 2, it will becoming increasingly clear to the viewer that the
passengers of Oceanic 815 had links between them that they were unaware of,
suggesting that they were connected in ways that they did not know long before
they got on the plane. During Season 2, publications and online blogs would
begin to highlight these links for the viewer who might well have missed them
because the writers were deliberately subtle in many of them, and quite a few
some freeze-framing was involved if you weren’t paying attention. The action on
the island might persuade some that Jack was right about mocking Locke. The
action in the flashbacks would convince us that Locke was right about destiny.
VHS Notes: There are many ads
noting the future premieres of Commander In Chief and Invasion on
this tape. Invasion was the first of far too many series to try and
building on the phenomena Lost had become. In my opinion, it was by far
the best and I still miss it.
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